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Jackie's Journal (5th excerpt)
(April 21, GM: Phil, Player: James) December 2015, Idaho I am tired of the secrets. Not long after I got back from Washington (so smooth a job it was barely worth a mention), almost three months ago now, Vegas took me to meet a man named Tom. He had an apartment on the other side of the city, fortified and magically warded. Vegas had been there before. They said I would be staying here for a while, that it would be safer for me. I guess I should have worked out then what was really going on, but I was too disoriented. I mean, it was pretty obvious that Tom wasn't just another hunter friend. Vegas and I don't keep secrets about hunter business. Mob business sure, that's Vegas' and I don't pry into it. And of course we can't always work the same hunts. Sometimes a group needs someone with Vegas' contacts or my Sight and we can't be everywhere at once. But we always let each other know what's going on. At least I thought we did. So if Tom wasn't hunter business, that meant he was personal, probably a lover. Somehow that was worse. I know I'm not really part of Vegas' family, not like Charlie was, but I thought they trusted me. You tell someone you trust when something important is happening in your life, don't you? I tell Vegas...well, everything. All this to say, I was too distracted to piece together why I was really being stuck off in a corner. I mean, I knew Vegas had struck some kind of a deal with the Devil. Everybody in Arcadia knew that much. What I didn't know is that their time was up and the forces of darkness were coming for their soul. If I had...it doesn't matter. I didn't. They didn't tell me. They told other hunters, put together a heavy squad, forced the Devil to renegotiate the terms of their contract. But all this I had to learn after the fact. We've been on the move for a while now. Vegas collected me from Tom's apartment and we started motel hopping. I don't know if we're running from him or demons or old mob cronies, but I don't think we'll ever be going back to Nevada. Last night, we stopped in Whisperville, Idaho. It's not too far from my old home, actually, and with the snow on the mountains it looked like something out of a Christmas card. By chance, we ran into some other hunters at the village tavern: Luiz, Morgan, and a kid I didn't know named Jasper. Luiz tried to sneak me a beer and we all swapped some war stories and I was feeling pretty good for the first time in a while. In the morning, everyone was dead. Well, not us, but that was sort of implied because I'm writing this. But everyone who lived in the town. The animals too, all the birds and rats and possums and the cows in the fields around the town. All dead. It could have been worse, I suppose. It was too cold for anything to rot. But the silence was deafening. The power was out as well and when I used my Sight, I found no auras anywhere. The life force had been leeched out of the place. We holed up in a lodge with a fireplace until enough magic had trickled back in for us to cast a tracking spell. It showed no lives anywhere except for little cluster a few miles out of town. It was as we were preparing to leave that dead began to wake. I can See ghosts. They're aren't as many around as you'd think and they mostly aren't very scary. They look pretty much like minds (I realize this isn't so helpful to those of you who can't just See minds) but with no bodies. But bodies without minds...that's frightening. There were a lot of them, but they weren't very fast, especially not after Rollo started ripping legs off. We managed to escape on a snowplow, heading for the spot the spell had shown us. The birds and horses might still have cut us off, but we put a spell on the plow to hide our life signature. I guess it worked pretty well because we got right up to the fancy, magically warded ski house (the only place for miles with lights on) without anyone noticing. Jasper (who is actually some kind of fox spirit, forgot to mention) decided to shut off the generator. That sort of worked too. A man came out of the house to check the generator. We surrounded him and tried to ask him some questions. He made the mistake of shooting some kind of black lightning towards Vegas. Rollo tore him to bits. Inside the house we found a lot of historical artifacts and photos showing a man at archeological digs going back more than a hundred years. He looked exactly the same in each picture. There were also twelve bunk beds. THe master bedroom however, did not appear to have been slept in and there were only twelve sets of dishes in the kitchen. We found them in the woods behind the house, one master and elven students waiting by a ring of standing stones for the arrival of the man Rollo had killed back by the generator. Jasper, in another flight of mischief, tried to steal the robes hat were awaiting the missing man. He was spotted, so of course we had to rush in to save him. Luiz cut the master down with a single blow of his club-sword and Vegas waded into his followers with their own new sword, a little present from Hell. I sent Rollo to back them up but before he could get there, someone grabbed me from behind. It was man the from the generator. He was carrying his severed head in one hand and his other hand blazed with black, cloying flames. I felt them sear me, burning not my flesh but my life. I couldn't help it. I screamed. Rollo leapt at the dead man, who called up more black fire in a protective wall. Rollo crashed right through it. The dark energy actually seemed to flow into him making him bigger and wilder. In another instant, the headless man was down again, but now one of the cultists Morgan had slain with her magic was standing up. She--this cultists had been a woman--let out another blast of those black flames. They collided with the red fire that sheathed Vegas' sword and the blade exploded. We realized the master of this cult was actually a lich, able to keep possessing fresh bodies forever unless its phylactery was destroyed. Morgan bound the thing in a circle, while Vegas and I ran back to the house to find the phylactery. I spotted an old bronze dagger that blazed in my Sight. Vegas rammed the thing down between two floorboards and twisted it until it snapped. Just then we heard a scream and roar of flame from the clearing it the woods and we dashed back. The lich had broken free of the circle. She seemed desperate now, lashing out in all directions. Rollo took another blast of the dark fire, growing even larger. Luckily Luiz managed to get in another of those decapitating strokes of his before anyone could get seriously hurt. The lich was dead. Well, more dead. From what we'd overheard to cultists say and papers we found back at the house, we managed to piece together what happened. The lich had gotten hold of an ancient prophecy foretelling the end of the world. To avoid going down with the ship, he and his followers were preparing to cast a ritual that would create an indestructible pocket world. This ritual required draining the life force out of huge area and threw in zombies as a sort of bonus. So on the plus side, we've put down an evil undead wizard and made the restless dead at peace again. One other hand, the world may still be ending. Honestly though, reading the prophecy doesn't really make me scared. It just pisses me off. Why can't prophets ever just say a thing straight out? Why all vagueness and mystery? Why all the secrets? I am tired of the secrets.